Fine find for Fark Florida flag.

Frank, forthright fishmonger forbids fake fish.

Oh,Rodger, what alliteration!

ok, I decided the quote deserves a picture to go with it

Charles Bronson is Florida's Agriculture Commissioner? And all this time, I thought he was dead.

Great Galloping Grouper!

It's not a groupah!

Well Florida, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Flaky flesh fake finds fickle fate falling for fiendish fools flailing finally flat.

Oooo, nice alliteration!

arreed, thanks a lot for making me spit apple chunks on the screen at work.

Fish.

likes the fish

I've never seen grouper on any menu when dining out; is it a regional thing? Does it really taste that good compared to other fish to justify the shenanigans?

JohnReddy: Charles Bronson is Florida's Agriculture Commissioner? And all this time, I thought he was dead.

//no, it's really the name of the Agri Commish! I chuckle every time I see his name on a gas pump!

I read it as Fake Gropinator.



//other coast

"I've never seen grouper on any menu when dining out; is it a regional thing? Does it really taste that good compared to other fish to justify the shenanigans?"

Dunno about grouper, but it's been a problem with NE scallops for decades; more than a few unscrupulous wholesalers and/or restaurants will use a cookie cutter or other sharp implement on a flounder or trash fish to make "scallops".

Expect this problem to get worse as overfishing continues.

And then expect it to go away entirely as we deplete entire species.

Befuddled: I've never seen grouper on any menu when dining out; is it a regional thing? Does it really taste that good compared to other fish to justify the shenanigans?

It's worth it, especially if you're getting something at the Columbia. That place is amazing!

So, when all else fails and you're on deadline, rewrite a year old story for your fish wrap paper?

/someone should write a book about this practice

This is pretty common, and it's not just with fish.

/Seriously though, faking tuna?

Befuddled & PunGent Oh you bet it is different. Much so. Grouper is an excellent tasting fish while tilapia has this muddy after-taste. Grouper is a clean living salt water fish while tilapia is a dirty fresh water fish that eats pond scum and weeds. It's other name is Nile Perch and like other wild life imported into Florida to solve a problem it creates more problems in the long run. It's a pest fish in many lakes and can easily be netted - they don't take a baited hook. Would you pay French Bordeaux wine prices for a bottle of Old Milwaukee beer? The two are that different. I have no issues with the Asian catfish sold as catfish - it has a nice flavor but likewise the cost of bringing it to the table is far less than the cost of grouper.

Baumer You betcha on the Columbia. I also trust the local Shells restaurants to bring grouper when they say they have it on the menu.

GomezAdams: Befuddled & PunGent Oh you bet it is different. Much so. Grouper is an excellent tasting fish while tilapia has this muddy after-taste. Grouper is a clean living salt water fish while tilapia is a dirty fresh water fish that eats pond scum and weeds. It's other name is Nile Perch and like other wild life imported into Florida to solve a problem it creates more problems in the long run. It's a pest fish in many lakes and can easily be netted - they don't take a baited hook. Would you pay French Bordeaux wine prices for a bottle of Old Milwaukee beer? The two are that different. I have no issues with the Asian catfish sold as catfish - it has a nice flavor but likewise the cost of bringing it to the table is far less than the cost of grouper.

Techinally, tilapia are cichlids. They aren't that much different from the sunfish/bass family.

I had grouper for dinner last night, so im really getting a kick out of these replies

When it comes down to it, I'd rather be cheated with fake grouper than order the new overpriced "exotic" uberfish tilapia. Tilapia is just a trashfish that needs so little oxygen that aquaculturists are having a field day marketing it to us stupid people.

/no, I dont order the "Chilean Sea Bass" either, just 'cause I like the name "Patagonian Toothfish" better
//fishsnob
///keep going to Red Lobster, people, it keeps the price of the good stuff down for the rest of us
// really, go get yourself some good fish
/really

trav-o: I had grouper for dinner last night, so im really getting a kick out of these replies

that's a coincidenc..
I had a grope after dinner last night and got kicked as a reply...

fishfoolsfeedsfatfarkersfakefantasy

GomezAdams: Baumer You betcha on the Columbia. I also trust the local Shells restaurants to bring grouper when they say they have it on the menu.

Yeah, the Shells on Anna Maria (is it still there?) was always pretty decent. Leverock's, on the otherhand...let's just say I used to work there, but didn't eat there so much. Guess that's why they closed.

Ahhhh,.....I remember the good old days when we would catch our own Grouper, gut it, filet it and then take it to the Pier House in Key West and let them charbroil it for us.

Muck4doo Technically Sunfish/Bass taste good. Tilapia do not. Species, genus, family, order, class, phylum aren't the issue hear. Taste is.

"It's something that's aggravated us for a long time," he said. "I've embarrassed girlfriends and wives in the past by making a big point of it in a grocery store, letting them know it wasn't what it was. I've embarrassed people that I've taken out to dinner by refusing a meal that wasn't really grouper."


I do this all the time. Lord help the waiter if they advertise and charge for fresh and serve me thawed out frozen fish. I even did it at the place that wins all the "Southern Living" awards here in town.

As a seafood insider, I was always amazed at the crap that the fish houses tried to pull. It's not just mislabeled fish, for a while there the manta ray population really suffered locally because some guy decided to cut plugs out of their backs and call them scallops.

Then I went up to the DC metro area and worked for a few months at
a grocery store that sold seafood. The first delivery I got, I sent 3/4 of it back, figuring it was all rotten. Turns out they have a different concept of fresh at retail places......if it doesn't smell like ammonia it isn't bad. The store got fish in from all over the world, most of it frozen, which was to be thawed out and then fresh stickers put on them. When I fished in the Gulf of Mexico, it was very rare that I would come across a diseased fish, like a tuna with black tumors in the meat. At the grocery store, even though the fish had to have been previously checked by a wholesale place before I got it, getting diseased and mutated fish was fairly common, especially if it came from Asia. The worst was those great big green "Tiger" shrimp from Bangladesh. Thawing out a two pound box of those stinking things was always an adventure.

My advice to seafood lovers in the big cities? Do not eat at an American place, most of them never buy anything fresh, ever. Go to some ethnic place (Peruvian, Italian, Greek, any black place from the Islands) that regularly serves seafood. They might talk a bit funny, but IMHO their seafood is superior.

&^%&dammit - hear != here.

fish

/oh, fishy, fishy, fishy, fish
//and it went
///wherever i
////did go...

Grouper is a very large ( up to hundreds of lbs.) that has firm white flesh and is fine eating. It's on the menu of most restaurants here, even if not in the kitchen.

Eat them up, yum!

©

FTA: And that hurts fishermen like Michael Athorn. He and his three-man crew spend up to 12 days 60 to 70 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to reach the 6,000-pound catch limit for grouper, which has to be caught on individual hooks.



To a fisherman like myself, this could be a fun job.

This is nothing new. Someone else was caught doing the same thing in Pinellas County last year.

And yes, grouper is worth it.

Ever had Jewfish?

Came here for pics. Coulda swore I saw the word fap in the headline.

Wait...did you say "fish flap" or "fish fap"?

/who knew?

FTA


"And that hurts fishermen like Michael Athorn. He and his three-man crew spend up to 12 days 60 to 70 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to reach the 6,000-pound catch limit for grouper, which has to be caught on individual hooks."



Individual hooks? Well I suppose so if you consider long lining "individual".

As far as grouper, it has a distinct flesh and grain.

It is good, but I would take some crappie (cold water) or mangrove snapper over grouper just because it is easier to catch for the average guy.

Grouper fishing is fun though, first time I ever caught one I felt like I was pulling up a dump truck and it was only a 20 pound fish.

You know what else smells like fish?

17 out of 24 restaurants served a substitute?

That's a beatin'. Followed by a tazin'.

The aquarium in Flatts Village, Bermuda has the coolest trained grouper. He can do "lay down" and "roll over" and likes to lay on the tank floor and get rubbed with sand. If you're lucky, there's a diver in there playing with him. If you're unlucky there is no diver and you just see "big fish, floating boringly".

Tilapia is not the same thing as Nile perch.
In all my years in the seafood business I never saw anyone attempt to 'punch' scallops out of anything. Now if you give me a hundred pounds of dry scallops I can make them weigh 130 by overusing sodium tripolyphosphate. varmitydog, if you were in the shrimp business you know what STP can do.

"Oh, F!"

Far from feigned fatuousness, Fred's feathered Frisian fetishes found favor, flirtatiously flicking Franny's flexuous form. Flaxen fardels of fibril fantoccini fell floorward, former fears of frustration fell frontless. Forsooth, fixatedly facing foresaid's firmly fattening falchion's florid finial, Franny felt fulminant frissons of feral femininity. Fred's fleetly flitting fingers forayed forever further for forbidden fruit. Finally freed of fettering frocks, Franny's fodgel flesh flounced forth. Fred furrowed Franny's fallow, fertile fields fervently. Frenetically fanning frou-frou fueled Frigga's fettled fire. Fay Franny's fractured farthingale framed Freya's frolicsome Fauvist figural. Facetiously fabricated fabliau? Fancifully far-fetched fantasy? Fabulist's fatuously formalized fairy-tale? Forlorn friend, fidelity fetches fair, fain, fellowly flowers, fragrant founts of flagrant ferity. Fin.

OK. This thread caused me to do some research. I hate working on the weekends, but I find tilapia is not Nile perch, so I sit corrected. Some years ago I took it as gospel when a friend made that connection when I asked what a tilapia was.

/Old Dawg still learns.
//Tilapia still tastes like crap warmed over.
///Spiderbarks It is an old trick to use a punch to make scallops from rays.

spiderbarks: Sodium tripolyphosphate. Nasty stuff. Buried a couple of friends who were overcome by those fumes. Never used it at all, I never had a boat that had a freezer hold, always operated out of boats that used ice in the holds. I always tried to sell directly to individual restaurants or fish markets, and one of my selling points was no STP. The fish houses froze everything, and they had barrels of the stuff laying around.

Yes, there are two kinds of scallops, the small ones are bay scallops and they are distinct, I never heard tell of anyone faking those. But the big ones, the sea scallops, look a whole lot like the manta ray meat. They would punch them out with a metal tool to look like the scallops and put them in the scallop goop in those paint can things they ship them in. They would ship them to the midwest, as far as I could remember. Best not to ask to many questions when you see stuff like that, it's hard enough to earn a legal living fishing without having the folks at the fish houses refusing to deal with you.

A good way to tell if you have a fake scallop is to pull it apart after you cook it. If it's a real scallop, it will pull apart like string cheese, because of the scallop's muscles. The fake scallops are just meat, they just flake apart.

PunGent: "I've never seen grouper on any menu when dining out; is it a regional thing? Does it really taste that good compared to other fish to justify the shenanigans?"

Dunno about grouper, but it's been a problem with NE scallops for decades; more than a few unscrupulous wholesalers and/or restaurants will use a cookie cutter or other sharp implement on a flounder or trash fish to make "scallops".


Man, somebody on Fark always knows what you know. I came here to say this.

It happens in Florida, too. I worked in a restaurant that created their own "scallops" this way, as well as using surimi in all of their crab dishes that didn't involve whole crabs (crab dip, crab stuffing, etc.)

It is an old trick to use a punch to make scallops from rays.

I'd have to see it to believe it. The scallop adductor muscle looks nothing like skate, shark or any other fish. I suppose you could find a rube dumb enough to fall for it but I have never seen any fake scallop offered any where. I bought and sold plenty of bay, sea and calico scallops in my time.
We had our own boats and docks in SW Florida. Winter was stone crab season and summer was grouper season. I cut more than a few tons of grouper.
To this day I will never eat a red grouper. God awfull wormy fish. Never found a red that didn't have parasites. Black was O.K. You'd only find worms in the organs, rarely in the meat.

There is a certain seafood restaurant in Gainesville that serves all kinds of fish that looks the same, but has many names. Like flounder and grouper.